Welcome to Living Prepared™. The mission of this blog is to revise, rewrite, and rethink personal emergency preparedness advice to make it practical and, at the same time, to live it and document that experience to validate that it is practical and that I do indeed practice what I preach. I hope that the result of this project will be a better tome of emergency and disaster preparedness than otherwise would have been possible.
Best regards,
Mark

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The American Red Cross launched its latest campaign – Do More Than Cross Your Fingers this month. A major focus of this campaign is to get people thinking and planning about preparedness more, and stresses the importance of getting emergency supplies together, which is actually at odds with a recent shift in focus by DHS/FEMA away from kits and towards the “getting informed” aspects of their Get Ready campaign (apparently mostly because of the cost factors involved).

Personally and professionally, I think having sufficient emergency supplies available for your family should be non-negotiable, and there are plenty of ways to do this effectively on a budget and at little to no extra cost (think stock rotation). [hmmm… I feel another posting series coming on – Living Prepared on a Budget].

I was introduced to the the Do More campaign by e-mail, which read in part that “The Do More campaign encourages families to take easy steps to prepare for the unexpected and provides a game and many resources to help parents do so.”

I like this.

The Prepare 4 game will collect your name, zip code and e-mail address and then has you search through the aisles of a grocery store to find missing items in your emergency kit. The game will pause at some point and ask you some questions about your household (number of persons, pets, etc.) and you’ll soon receive an e-mail with a customized emergency supply list that you should get for your household. It’s a good list. The one they sent me you can see here.

The Do More site also has a flash bulletin board called My Kit where people can post and share their own ideas for items that should be included in an emergency kit, or you can simply browse the ideas of others. (I assume someone is vetting the submissions before they are made publicly available).

I really like this.

Making learning about preparedness to be a fun online experience is a great way to attract an audience and impart important knowledge.

About a year ago, I was introduced to a link to an online game in which you were presented with a few different earthquake scenarios (at work, at night, one other I can’t recall) and you had to pick the best option (e.g. hide under bed or desk, run outside). It was developed for a California county as I recall, and despite spending some time searching online today, I couldn’t find it. If this rings a bell and you know the url, please send it to me or add it as a comment to this post.

I believe that gaming is a great way to impart disaster preparedness knowledge in a fun and educational way to a large number of people. There are several good simulations out there already – but there is much more fertile ground for development in this area.

I did find a few good disaster preparedness simulation games that I thought I would share with you:

Stop Disasters: developed by UNISDR (the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction): a very detailed and complex simulation about how to mitigate natural disaster risks from tsunamis to wildfires to earthquakes to hurricanes and more. You have to build a resilient and resistant community before a natural disaster strikes in order to minimize the loss of life and property.